Curiosities About The Emotional Mind
Our brain is made up of an emotional part and a more rational or thinking part. Sometimes both are combined to help us in our day-to-day life, while at other times each of them manages whatever comes their way.
Today, most of the information we have refers to the most rational part of our brain. But what is it that differentiates the emotional mind? What are its characteristics? Here we reveal some curiosities about the emotional sphere of our mind.
The emotional mind is faster to act
The emotional mind is characterized by being faster than the rational mind, taking action almost immediately, without stopping to consider what it is doing, acting automatically, its responses generally being more imprecise.
Such is its speed that it usually makes analytical reflection impossible, a characteristic work of the thinking or rational mind. And at the end of what happened, when things return to their place, we find ourselves wondering why we have done it, indicating that the rational mind is beginning to activate, in a much slower way.
There is a slower way of processing information that is carried out by our rational part, but the one performed by our emotional part is faster, happening almost without realizing it and relying on first impressions, capturing everything at once, leaving to one side the evaluation of the details.
Although we are scared by this quick reaction that can be wrong at times, it also has its advantages, since the emotional mind can capture an (emotional) reality in just a few moments, making a series of immediate judgments that tell us who we should trust or trust. who can we take care of.
Paul Ekman, a pioneering psychologist in the study of emotions, explains in relation to the seizure that emotions have over us before we are conscious, that they play an adaptive role, giving us the possibility of mobilizing ourselves to respond to urgent situations or issues without that we waste time in stopping to reflect on how we have to act.
On the other hand, the slowest modality of emotional response would be the one where you first reflect before leading to the feeling. Being here more aware of our thoughts, playing a determining role of emotions.
Has an incredible sense of certainty
Actions originating from the emotional mind also carry a powerful sense of certainty, constituting a bewildering way of seeing things for the rational mind at times.
It is as if the emotional mind were our radar on alert to perceive the dangers that lie in wait, constituting intuitive judgments that, when made so quickly, can sometimes be erroneous.
It’s childish
On many occasions, the emotional mind is childish as Daniel Goleman says in one of his books. And the more childish it is, the more intense the emotion will be.
To understand this, Goleman gives us some examples such as categorical thinking or all or nothing, in which there is no gray scale or personalized thinking, in which the facts are perceived by focusing on ourselves.
That is, the emotional mind has its beliefs as absolute reality, putting aside all evidence that leads to the opposite direction. For the emotional mind, what is felt is always the real thing, even when our way of feeling comes from a wrong way of thinking.
That is why it is sometimes so difficult to reason with a person when he is emotionally shocked, experiencing his emotional abduction, since the logic of the arguments does not matter if they are not molded to the emotional conviction of that moment.
Respond to the traces of the past
The emotional mind has the ability to respond to a situation that presents some features similar to a memory from the past, activating the feelings that accompanied the event in question.
The emotional mind reacts in the present as if it were in the past due to those common features that the situation presents, playing a selective function.
Image courtesy of Sandra Stipan
